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SPRINGFIELD — There’s got to be a certain hubris involved when a guy who owns a body shop in Springfield thinks he can make it the subject of a successful reality TV show.

Fortunately Mark Worman, owner of Welby’s Car Care, has a pretty healthy regard for himself and the work of his six-employee crew.

Worman makes a living mending wrecked vehicles.

But his great passion is Chrysler muscle cars, those big-engined, affordably priced Chargers and Barracudas of the late 1960s and early ’70s, cars that by 1975 had been shouldered off the road by consumer protection and environmental activists who preferred much tamer beasts.

Worman, 47, never quite outgrew those cars, and over the years he’s mastered the art of restoring them. He can take a thrashed rusted-out car body that’s been sitting in the rain for a couple of decades, pull out the wrinkles, cut out the rust, add in original parts and bring the car back to its former luster.

This is no cheap re-body job where the mechanic cuts out the VIN number on a rare but wrecked car and attaches it to a more common but less beat-up cousin. It’s painstaking work that can take months to do properly, Worman said.

Why bother? A good restoration of a rare muscle car can bring in a six-figure reward, he said.

So when he got his hands on a crinkly mess of a 1971 Hemi-orange ’Cuda — they dropped the “Barra” from the name of the high-performance version — he didn’t want anyone wondering whether he’d faked the work and vowed to document the job on film.

And that’s when it came to him: Reality show in the body shop.

Out on the lot behind his work bays a couple of dozen bodies of long-dead muscle machines make sense of the name he chose for his show: “Graveyard Carz.”

With help from a couple of eager videographers — producer-editor Aaron Smith, and graphics, compositing, 3-D re-creation wiz Casey Faris — Worman has created an hourlong pilot. It cost in the neighborhood of $25,000 to produce and took more than two years to complete.

Think “American Chopper” — the cable show about feuding motorcycle mechanics — meets “History Detectives,” the public broadcasting program that delves into the intrigues of the past.

Worman’s on-screen persona is gruff, bordering on rude to his employees working on the car. They dish it right back at him.

The story line also loops through a more personal history, with Worman seeking out, finding and interviewing the car’s original owner, as well as sleuthing for parts through the rural boneyard where the car sat rusting for decades.

But all the time and painstaking work on the pilot is probably the easy part.

How likely is it that a Springfield good ol’ boy who didn’t bother with high school and just went straight to working on cars, can get the attention of television executives in Los Angeles?

“I don’t want to be a buzz kill,” said Ed Eberle, a Portland video producer, when asked about Worman’s chances.

But the truth is it’s hard, he said. Eberle knows the joys of creating a pilot and the frustrations of waiting for it to be bought.

He figured the national interest in sustainable living would create an obvious audience for his pilot “Natural Home,” a program about environmentally friendly building projects. He shopped it at a national gathering of TV executives last year. He got an agent, and he’s still waiting for the phone to ring.

“It’s very difficult to get your fingers into that pie,” he said.

Worman might have better luck because of his content, Eberle said.

“Reality shows are propelled by a dynamic that’s about confrontation,” he said.

There’s plenty of that in “Graveyard Carz.”

Getting a deal for the show might be possible if Worman uses the Internet to build a following for it first, said Vince Porter, executive director of the Governor’s Office of Film and Television. Porter was once a vice president of production at Showtime.

Writer Diablo Cody built an audience through blogging that helped her when she successfully peddled a screenplay in Hollywood, Porter said. Her film, “Juno,” won her an Academy Award.

“Lonely Girl15” was a huge YouTube video sensation, Porter noted, with millions of hits from fans intrigued and unclear whether the production was real or staged.

“Develop the audience or the following before you even go to a network,” he said.

That’s part of the plan for “Graveyard Carz,” producer Aaron Smith said. It has a Facebook page and a Web site, and a University of Oregon marketing expert has agreed to help the fledging production develop a following.

“We’re just trying to over the next months build as much as an Internet fan base as we can” he said.